Testimonies from workers at the plant from the worst of the crisis are leaking out, pardon the pun. Here's a small excerpt:

They described attempts to release pressure from a reactor container by manually opening a ventilation valve.

"We put on the full protection gear but couldn't possibly let young workers do the task, as we had to go into an area where the radiation levels were high,'' one worker recalled.

"When I got to the place to open the valve, I heard eerie, deep popping noise from the torus (a donut-shaped structure at the bottom of the reactor),'' he said.

"When I put one of my feet on the torus to reach the valve, my black rubber boot melted and slipped (due to the heat).''

The operators also spoke of dismal working conditions as they battled to stabilise the crippled plant.

"We experienced big aftershocks, and many times we had to run up a hill in desperation (fearing a tsunami) with the full-face mask still on,'' one worker said.

Another worker spoke of the race to lay power cables and bring back the supply of electricity, saying: "We finished the work (in one section) in several hours, although it usually requires one month or two.''

"It was an operation we had to do in puddles, fearing electrification,'' the worker said.

Explosions and fires at the plant unleashed dangerous levels of radiation, forcing TEPCO to pull out hundreds of workers, leaving just a few dozen behind.

Those workers earned the nickname "the Fukushima Fifty'', but that number eventually swelled again by thousands, including technicians sent from partners such as Toshiba and Hitachi.

Don't know how I missed this, but late November, a planned removal of radioactive gas from the reactors measured higher than safe hydrogen amounts - which could lead to more explosions. Some measurements were as high as 2.9 percent, while 4 percent is the danger level.

I honestly thought we were past such concerns, anyway more nitrogen being pumped in to alleviate problem. I am curious why they stopped pumping in nitrogen in the first place.

If I still have anyone's attention, could you read this for me. This headline from Huntington News, in it's link and in the headline says:

However in the body of the article (it's short) there is no mention of any leak, only the hydrogen buildup. "Leaking again" is a provocative headline, yet there is no additional leakage mentioned here or elsewhere. Bad journalism in my opining.

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- When engineering professor Yotaro Hatamura took the job of heading the independent investigation into the Fukushima disaster, he said he was looking for lessons rather than culprits. He may have changed his mind.

In a 507-page report published yesterday after a six-month investigation, Hatamura reserves some of his strongest criticism for Japan's atomic power regulator, the Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency, known as NISA.

NISA officials left the Dai-Ichi nuclear plant after the March 11 earthquake and when ordered to return by the government provided little assistance to Tokyo Electric Power Co. staff struggling to gain control of three melting reactors, according to the report.

“Monitoring the plant's status was the most important action at that time, so to evacuate was very questionable,” the report by Hatamura's 10-member team concluded. The committee found “no evidence that the NISA officials provided necessary assistance or advice.” Even though NISA's manual said to stay at the plant, their manager gave the officials permission to evacuate, according to the report, which doesn't name the manager.

The preliminary conclusions by Hatamura, who specializes in studies of industrial accidents caused by design flaws and human error, includes a slew of planning failures, breakdown in communication and operational mistakes by Tokyo Electric and the government before and after the earthquake and tsunami.

No Power

While the utility supplied the electricity that kept homes, factories and offices running in metropolitan Tokyo, the world's biggest city, lack of preparation for power failure in the Fukushima station left workers reduced to flashlights at the 864-acre plant site, the size of about 490 soccer fields.

Batteries in cell phones at the Fukushima plant started running out on March 11 and with the failure of mains power couldn't be recharged, preventing communication with the on-site emergency headquarters, according to the report.

Because the utility known as Tepco hadn't considered a tsunami overwhelming the Fukushima plant, no preparation was made for “simultaneous and multiple losses of power” causing station blackout, the document says. The blackout caused the failure of all personal handyphone system units in the plant, seriously disrupting communications among staff.

Fractured Communications

Communications became so fractured that plant manager Masao Yoshida, stationed in the emergency bunker, didn't know what some workers were doing. The high pressure coolant injection system at the No. 3 reactor was stopped by a worker without authority from plant managers, according to the report. The reactor was one of the three that melted down.

In Tokyo, the central government's response was muddled by miscommunication between two teams working on different floors of the same building, the report said.

The report also criticized the government for failing to use its system for monitoring the spread of radiation in calculating evacuation areas. While the monitoring tool lacked sufficient data for an accurate assessment because of communication failures, its predictive functions should have been used, the report said.

Withholding Information

The government also erred in keeping data on the spread of radiation from the public. “Information on urgent matters was delayed, press releases were withheld, and explanations were kept ambiguous,” the report concluded.

The report by Hatamura, professor emeritus at University of Tokyo, serves as a time line for the chaos that ensued when the record magnitude-9 earthquake knocked out power and buckled roads before the tsunami flooded backup generators. Radiation fallout from the reactors forced the evacuation of about 160,000 people. The government has yet to say how many can return and when.

Jun Oshima, a spokesman for Tepco, declined to comment on the report as the utility is checking the contents, he said.

Hotlines between the central control room and the reactor buildings worked following the quake, while workers outside the buildings could use a total of nine transceivers, spokesman Masato Yamaguchi said yesterday. The company added 29 transceivers on March 13 and 80 more on March 15, Yamaguchi said.

Failed Procedures

On NISA procedures, the report says the agency's manual called for inspectors to remain at Dai-Ichi in an emergency while other officials head to the offsite emergency command office 5 kilometers (3 miles) away in Okuma town.

By March 14, all eight NISA officials, who are unidentified in the report, had left Dai-Ichi.

“The inspectors were in charge of gathering live information on the site,” Hiroyuki Fukano, director-general of NISA, told reporters in Tokyo last night. “It's a serious problem that they didn't do their job, though it's a matter of NISA's system, rather than individual inspectors,” said Fukano who was appointed after the former head Nobuaki Terasaka was fired in August.

Kazuma Yokota, NISA's chief inspector at Dai-Ichi at the time of the quake, said in an interview with Bloomberg News in April he was one of three inspectors who left the plant 15 minutes after the temblor for Okuma. The three reached the center in 15 minutes and found it wrecked, power down and no working communications, he said.

‘Unaware'

A person who answered a call to Yokota's cell phone yesterday said it was a wrong number. An official reached by phone in NISA's office in Fukushima said Yokota was not available.

“People are often unaware of the functions of the organizations they belong to,” Hatamura told reporters yesterday. “If you don't understand that function, you can't live up to the expectations that people put on your organization. This is basically what happened at NISA after the accident.”

Hatamura's full report is expected in the summer of 2012, when it will include interviews with former Prime Minister Naoto Kan and other Cabinet officials. Those interviews weren't completed for the interim report due to time constraints, according to a briefing by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry last week.

The committee interviewed 456 people over a total of 900 hours of hearings by Dec. 16, according to the report.

Running Away

Interviewing Kan may be necessary to reach a conclusion on media reports that former Tepco President Masataka Shimizu requested to evacuate all employees from the plant following the disaster.

Tepco has denied it made that request, while Hatamura's report said the company was planning a “partial evacuation.”

Hatamura was appointed by the government in May to lead an “impartial and multifaceted” investigation into the nuclear accident, the worst since Chernobyl in 1986.

He received his Ph.D. in industrial mechanical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1973 and began studying human error after finding his students were more interested in how projects can go wrong, according to the publisher of his book “Learning from Failure.”

The Failure Knowledge Database that he set up has studies on more than 1,100 accidents, including a case study of Tokyo Electric and its falsification of nuclear plant maintenance records, which the utility admitted in 2002. The study concludes the faked reports resulted from lack of quality control and proper risk management.

The disaster at Dai-Ichi shows the need for a “paradigm shift in the basic principles of disaster prevention” at nuclear power plants, Hatamura's committee concluded in the report. “It's inexcusable that a nuclear accident couldn't be managed because a major event such as the tsunami exceeded expectations.”

Just when you thought I had finally ceased bumping this one, a short but sweet article:

THERE is a breathtaking serenity to the valley that winds from the town of Namie, on the coast of Fukushima prefecture, into the hills above. A narrow road runs by a river that passes through steep ravines, studded with maples. Lovely it may be, but it is the last place where you would want to see an exodus of 8,000 people fleeing meltdowns at a nearby nuclear-power plant.

Along that switchback road the day after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11th 2011, it took Namie’s residents more than three hours to drive 30km (19 miles) to what they thought was the relative safety of Tsushima, a secluded hamlet. What they did not know was that they were heading into an invisible fog of radioactive matter that has made this one of the worst radiation hotspots in Japan—far worse than the town they abandoned, just ten minutes’ drive from the gates of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. It was not until a New York Times report in August that many of the evacuees realised they had been exposed to such a danger, thanks to government neglect.

Negligence forms the backdrop for the first government-commissioned report into the Fukushima nuclear disaster, released in late December. Although only an interim assessment (the complete report is due in the summer), it is already 500 pages long and the product of hundreds of interviews. A casual reader might be put off by the technical detail and the dearth of personal narrative. Yet by Japanese standards it is gripping. It spares neither the government nor Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the operator of the nuclear plant. It reveals at times an almost cartoon-like level of incompetence. Whether it is enough to reassure an insecure public that lessons will be learnt is another matter.

Since the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, it has become axiomatic to assume that complex systems fail in complex ways. That was broadly true of Fukushima, though often the failures appear absurdly elementary. In the most quake-prone archipelago on earth, TEPCO and its regulators had no accident-management plan in the event of earthquakes and tsunamis—assuming, apparently, that the plant was proofed against them and that any hypothetical accidents would be generated only from within. TEPCO had, in the event of nuclear disaster, an off-site emergency headquarters just 5km from the plant that was not radiation-proof, and so was effectively useless. On site, the workers in its number one reactor appear not to have been familiar with an emergency-cooling system called an isolation condenser, which they wrongly thought was still working after the tsunami. Their supervisors made the same mistake, so a vital six hours were lost before other methods for cooling the overheating atomic fuel rods were deployed. Partly as a result, this was the first reactor to explode on March 12th.

The government was almost as clueless. Naoto Kan, then prime minister, had a crisis headquarters on the fifth floor of the Kantei, his office building. But emergency staff from various ministries were relegated to the basement, and there was often miscommunication, not least because mobile phones did not work underground. Crucial data estimating the dispersion of radioactive matter were not given to the prime minister’s office, so that evacuees like those from Namie were not given any advice on where to go. That is why they drove straight into the radioactive cloud. The report faults the government for providing information that was often bogus, ambiguous or slow. Perhaps the biggest failure was that nobody in a position of responsibility—neither TEPCO nor its regulators—had sought to look beyond the end of their noses in disaster planning. No one seems ever to have tried to “think the unthinkable”.

In America official reports such as those on the September 11th attacks or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have become acclaimed books. This one is hardly a page-turner. A privately funded foundation, headed by Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, is doing a separate investigation, based partly on the testimony of TEPCO whistle-blowers. (One, according to Mr Funabashi, says the earthquake damaged the reactors before the tsunami, a claim that officials have always rejected.) It at least promises to have literary merit. Mr Funabashi, a prominent author, draws parallels between the roots of the disaster and Japan’s failures in the second world war. They include the use of heroic front-line troops with out-of-touch superiors; rotating decision-makers too often; narrow “stovepipe” thinking; and the failure to imagine that everything could go wrong at once.

Complex systems, jerry-rigged

For now, the risk is that the interim report does not get the attention it deserves. So far it seems to have aroused more interest on a techie website called Physics Forums, beloved of nuclear engineers, than in the Japanese press. The government, led by Yoshihiko Noda, has not yet used it as a rallying call for reform. One of its recommendations, an independent new regulatory body, will soon be set up. Others, such as new safety standards and broader evacuation plans, would take months to implement.

Such reports are, after all, confidence-building exercises. They are meant to reassure the public that, by exposing failures, they will help to prevent them from being repeated. In the case of Fukushima Dai-ichi there is still plenty to be nervous about. Although the government declared on December 16th that the plant had reached a state of “cold shutdown”, much of the cooling system is jerry-rigged and probably still not earthquake-proof. On January 1st a quake temporarily caused water levels to plunge in a pool containing highly radioactive spent-fuel rods.

Meanwhile, across Japan, 48 out of 54 nuclear reactors remain out of service, almost all because of safety fears. Until somebody in power seizes on the report as a call to action, its findings, especially those that reveal sheer ineptitude, suggest that the public has every reason to remain as scared as hell.

The Japanese government is investigating how radioactive concrete ended up in a new apartment complex in the Fukushima Prefecture, housing evacuees from a town near the crippled nuclear plant.

The contamination was first discovered when dosimeter readings of children in the city of Nihonmatsu, roughly 40 miles from the reactors at Fuksuhima Dai-ichi, revealed a high school student had been exposed to 1.62 millisieverts in a span of three months, well above the annual 1 millisievert limit the government has established for safety reasons. Further investigation traced the radiation back to the student’s three-story apartment building, where officials detected radioactive cesium inside the concrete.

Radiation levels at the 6-month-old apartment were higher inside the building than outside. A dozen families live in the new apartment complex.

The gravel used in the cement came from a quarry in the town of Namie, located just miles from the Fukushima plant. While Namie sits inside the government mandated 12-mile “no-go” zone because of radiation concerns, it wasn’t completely closed off until the end of April, meaning the gravel was exposed to radiation spewing from the Fukushima plant during that time.

The owner of the quarry said he shipped 5,200 tons of gravel to 19 different companies, two of which now say they sold the material to 200 construction firms. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry has launched an investigation to determine where the gravel was used.

That was appreciated reboot. Scary stuff, that concrete could have gone anywhere, and indeed did. That would amount to external exposure, not internal, which is worse, but it still adds up. Yes, I am somewhat of a mini-expert on this stuff nw.

It never ceases to amaze and dismay ~ The unseen repercussions. A thousand brilliant minds could dedicate themselves to trying to anticipate the aftermath of a disaster and they'd never cover everything. I'd be so sad to learn that the concrete was sold "knowing." Sadder, I wouldn't be surprised. Not in every case, but that no one involved suspected? Not likely.

"I'd be so sad to learn that the concrete was sold "knowing." Sadder, I wouldn't be surprised. Not in every case, but that no one involved suspected? Not likely."

Yes, this same scenario runs through my head. The gravel was indeed sold before there was widespread recognition by people and he gov't that a wide area just northwest of the 20 km evac zone had received/was receiving a huge dose of radiation. That quarry is likely abandoned right now. It simply HAD to have gone through the minds of those that sold it and those that first bought it that this stuff had a high potential to be dangerous. But no one said anything until a boy's radiation meter (yes parts of Fukushima have kids walking around all day with dosimeters around their necks instead of tamagochi) went way too high in too short a time and they determined it came from the concrete walls in his new apartment complex in a "safe" area after his family evacuated out of the 20 km radius.

Sad. An update I read said that so far they have only traced sold gravel to companies in Fukushima. Lucky for us, another knock for Fukushima.

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